The 40th anniversary of the Iran hostage crisis…
Iran on Monday held an event commemorating the 40th anniversary of the 1979 hostage crisis at the U.S. Embassy and also announced fresh violations of the 2015 nuclear deal it arranged with former U.S. President Barack Obama, including plans to deploy a new uranium centrifuge that would work 50 times faster than the equipment it was permitted to use under the deal.
For the occasion, I’m going to recycle a (slightly edited) post I wrote in 2006 about the Iranian spokesman during the crisis, Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, a figure who fascinated me at the time of the crisis and who met a sorry end. (There are a number of dead links in the post; I noted some but probably didn’t catch them all.)
______________________
In this Atlantic article [link now dead], a name on the first page caught my eye: Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, the Iranian foreign minister at the time of the hostage crisis.
Suddenly, although I hadn’t thought of him in decades, the memory came back. Ghotbzadeh! I recall his sardonic, jaded, man-of-the-world expression—a strange combination of arrogance and weariness. As the spokesperson for the regime, he was featured often on TV (I think on the nascent “Nightline,” “America Held Hostage”). As a visible and familiar figure, he became somewhat of a focus for my frustration and annoyance with the entire situation. Something about him seemed hollow, although he was clearly intelligent and articulate.
As events unfolded, it turned out that Ghotbzadeh was one of those cautionary figures, a man who was instrumental in planning a revolution that then got away from him and proceeded to devour him in the process. Like Robespierre, Danton, and Desmoulins; like Trotsky and so many other engineers of the Russian revolution who were slaughtered in the great purges; authors of violent revolutions often come to violent ends at the hands of their violent former comrades.
Thus it was with Ghotbzadeh. Here he is:
Ghotbzadeh was close to the Ayatollah Khomeini while both were in exile in Paris, and became one of his right-hand men back home in the early days of the revolution. He seems to have been motivated most strongly by hatred of the Shah’s regime. But, paradoxically, his role in the hostage crisis was as a relative moderate (accent on the “relative;” moderate in comparison to what?). He seemed to be working for a diplomatic solution, and lost favor with the Iranian powers that be in the process.
Former hostage and Ambassador at the time, Bruce Laingen, has this to say [another dead link] about Ghotbzadeh:
I didn’t like him at the outset for the role he played as Foreign Minister, but I sensed as time went on over those months, that he came to the conclusion, himself, fairly early, that this hostage business was counterproductive to the revolution and that it needed to be ended. I think he genuinely wanted to end it and was prepared to make some concessions to do that. And he stuck his neck out to do that. He showed some guts.
It all unraveled rather quickly:
Ghotbzadeh finally resigned in 1980 over the deadlock in negotiations. That year, after he was arrested and briefly detained after criticizing the ruling Islamic Republican Party, he retired from public life. In 1982 he was arrested on charges of plotting against the regime. Although he denied any conspiracy to take Khomeini’s life, he apparently admitted complicity with Ayatollah Mohammad Kazem Shariat-Madari in a plot to overthrow the government. Ghotbzadeh was convicted in August 1982 and executed the following month.
Did he really plan to end the Khomeini reign, and, if so, with what was he planning to replace it? Or were the charges trumped up, and was he forced to confess to crimes he didn’t commit? At the time, I remember being astounded at the news of his startling reversal of fortune and allegiance; it was quite a switch from disliking him to feeling some sympathy for the man.
Guillotining having gone out of style, Ghotbzadeh was shot by a firing squad shortly after his trial. The revolution had eaten another of its own.
But not everyone connected with the early days of the revolution has met such a fate. Others connected with the hostage crisis have prospered. It’s unclear whether or not the current Iranian President, our good friend Ahmadinejad, was one of those “student” hostage-takers, although several former hostages have identified him as such. But there’s very little doubt about the identity of another former hostage-taker who’s riding high at present: Hussein Sheikholeslam, recently an Iranian diplomat and legislator.
Why do I mention Sheikholeslam? Only because I came across an interesting fact about him, an indication of the sort of cross-fertilization process that seems to have been at work in the revolutions of the 60s/70s. Sheikholeslam may not have been an actual student at the time of the hostage-taking in Iran. But whether or not Sheikholeslam was a student at that point, he certainly had been a student earlier—at UC Berkeley, where he learned a thing or two:
UC Berkeley gained a reputation as a center of student anti-war protest during the 1960s and 1970s. During that tempestuous period, an Iranian student named Hussein Sheikh-ol-eslam attended Cal. He became fluent in English. He also absorbed the demonstrations criticizing American imperialism in Vietnam and other nations.
After Hussein returned to Iran, writes Mark Bowden in his new book, “Guests of the Ayatollah,” his anti-Americanism planted deep roots in his Islamic religion. In late 1979, the tree connected to those roots bore ugly fruit.
The student protests of the 60s didn’t actually revolutionize much in the directly political and traditionally revolutionary (i.e. a sudden overthrow of the existing government) sense in the US. The “revolution” they began here took a cultural form, with resultant political results (and intent). But in Iran, students who had learned the anti-American and propaganda lessons of the 60s used them later to great (and more instant) effect. Some forget that the 60s didn’t just happen in this country; the protests occurred in Europe as well.
Khomeini spent some of his exile in France, but I was surprised to learn (from Wikipedia) that the French were not necessarily simpatico to him during his rather short sojourn there:
In 1963, [Khomeini] publicly denounced the government of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. He was thereby imprisoned for 8 months, and upon his release in 1964, he made a similar denunciation of the United States. This led to his forced exile out of Iran. He initially went to Turkey but was later allowed to move to Iraq, where he stayed until being forced to leave in 1978, after then-Vice President Saddam Hussein forced him out…after which he went to Neauphle-le-Ché¢teau in France. According to Alexandre de Marenches (then head of the French secret services), France suggested to the Shah that they could “arrange for Khomeini to have a fatal accident”; the Shah declined the assassination offer, arguing that this would make him a martyr.
[NOTE: My post about Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, is relevant here. Nafisi, an Iranian national, likewise fell in with other radical Iranian students while studying in this country. Then, when she returned to Iran, she saw quite a few of those former associates imprisoned—and in some cases executed—by their former comrades-in-arms.]
[ADDENDUM: Also please see this about the Carter administration’s failed hostage rescue attempt.]
Omri Ceren, twitter:
Sen. Ted Cruz, twitter:
Everybody talks about Vietnam but isn’t Iran just as big, if not bigger, a failure on the part of our foreign policy elites?
Mike
A friend of mine fled Iran in the 50s, opposing the Shah. He came to the US and went to medical school with me. Before the Revolution, but after finishing his orthopedic surgery residency, he decided he wanted his parents in Tehran to meet his American wife and children. They all flew to Tehran and, when they arrived at the Tehran airport, the SAVAK took him aside into a private room. He was told he had two choices. He could get on a plane to New York or he could serve his one year in the Iranian army. If the latter, they could visit his parents. He chose to stay and, during his year as an oil field doctor, he learned to play golf on the sandy course where they carried a square of Astroturf to hit the ball from.
He still plays golf.
The SAVAK was nothing like the IRG.
Tablet Magazine, Eliora Katz: THE REVOLT AGAINST IRAN
55.4 ? Questioner: Am I to understand then— just the fact that the third-density entity on this planet, just the fact that he calls or bids an Orion Crusader is a polarizing type of action that affects both entities?
Ra: I am Ra. This is incorrect. The calling mechanism is not congruent in the slightest degree with the bidding mechanism. In the calling, the entity which calls is a suppliant neophyte asking for aid in negative understanding, if you may excuse this misnomer. The Orion response increases its negative polarity as it is disseminating the negative philosophy, thereby enslaving or bidding the entity calling.
There are instances, however, when the contact becomes a contest which is prototypical of negativity. In this contest, the caller will attempt, not to ask for aid, but to demand results. Since the third-density negatively oriented harvestable entity has at its disposal an incarnative experiential nexus and since Orion Crusaders are, in a great extent, bound by the first distortion in order to progress, the Orion entity is vulnerable to such bidding if properly done. In this case, the third-density entity becomes master and the Orion Crusader becomes entrapped and can be bid. This is rare. However, when it has occurred, the Orion entity or social memory complex involved has experienced loss of negative polarity in proportion to the strength of the bidding third-density entity.
11.15 ? Questioner: Is it impossible for you to tell us precisely how he does this service?
Ra: I am Ra. It is possible for us to speak to this query. However, we use any chance we may have to reiterate the basic understanding/learning that all beings serve the Creator.
The one you speak of as Genghis Khan, at present, is incarnate in a physical light body which has the work of disseminating material of thought control to those who are what you may call crusaders. He is, as you would term this entity, a shipping clerk.
11.16 ? Questioner: What do the crusaders do?
Ra: I am Ra. The crusaders move in their chariots to conquer planetary mind/body/spirit social complexes before they reach the stage of achieving social memory.
11.18 ? Questioner: Then we have crusaders from Orion coming to this planet for mind control purposes. How do they do this?
Ra: As all, they follow the Law of One observing free will. Contact is made with those who call. Those then upon the planetary sphere act much as do you to disseminate the attitudes and philosophy of their particular understanding of the Law of One which is service to self. These become the elite. Through these, the attempt begins to create a condition whereby the remainder of the planetary entities are enslaved by their own free will.
11.19 ? Questioner: Can you name any of the recipients of the crusaders’— that is, any names that may be known on the planet today?
Ra: I am Ra. I am desirous of being in nonviolation of the free will distortion. To name those involved in the future of your space/time is to infringe; thus, we withhold this information. We request your contemplation of the fruits of the actions of those entities whom you may observe enjoying the distortion towards power. In this way you may discern for yourself this information. We shall not interfere with the, shall we say, planetary game. It is not central to the harvest.
11.20 ? Questioner: How do the crusaders pass on their concepts to the incarnate individuals on Earth?
Ra: I am Ra. There are two main ways, just as there are two main ways of, shall we say, polarizing towards service to others. There are those mind/body/spirit complexes upon your plane who do exercises and perform disciplines in order to seek contact with sources of information and power leading to the opening of the gate to intelligent infinity. There are others whose vibratory complex is such that this gateway is opened and contact with total service to self with its primal distortion of manipulation of others is then afforded with little or no difficulty, no training, and no control.
11.21 ? Questioner: What type of information is passed on from the crusaders to these people?
Ra: I am Ra. The Orion group passes on information concerning the Law of One with the orientation of service to self. The information can become technical just as some in the Confederation, in attempts to aid this planet in service to others, have provided what you would call technical information. The technology provided by this group is in the form of various means of control or manipulation of others to serve the self.
11.31 ? Questioner: I don’t know if this is a short question or not, so we can save it till next time, but my only question is why the crusaders from Orion do this. What is their ultimate objective? This is probably too long to answer.
Ra: I am Ra. This is not too long to answer. To serve the self is to serve all. The service of the self, when seen in this perspective, requires an ever-expanding use of the energies of others for manipulation to the benefit of the self with distortion towards power.
If there are further queries to more fully explicate this subject we shall be with you again.- From the Law of One message by Ra.
https://www.lawofone.info/results.php?q=crusader
Iran has greatly polarized and achieved totalitarian power. Their methods of power and might is easy to see.
Mike K:
A post I wrote about SAVAK.
I still enjoy the film, “300,” adapted from the Frank Miller graphic novel on the Battle of Thermopylae between the Spartans and the Persians (Iranians).
The film received ample criticism for making the Persians look bad, but that was a feature, not a bug, for me. No less than Victor Davis Hanson wrote the forward to a reissue of the graphic novel:
The movie does demonstrate real affinity with Herodotus in two areas. First, it captures the martial ethos of the Spartan state, the notion that the sum total of a man’s life, the ultimate arbiter of all success or failure, is how well he fought on the battlefield, especially when it becomes clear at last that bravery cannot prevent defeat. And second, the Greeks, if we can believe Simonides, Aeschylus, and Herodotus, saw Thermopylae as a “clash of civilizations” that set Eastern centralism and collective serfdom against the idea of the free citizen of an autonomous polis.
–Victor Davis Hanson
https://www.city-journal.org/html/your-shield-or-it-9420.html
Considering the zealous over-regimentation of Spartan life, they weren’t exactly what most of us would call “free citizens,” but I take your point.
“the Shah declined the assassination offer, arguing that this would make him a martyr.”
But a dead martyr might not have wreaked the havoc that the living tyrant accomplished.
Neo, I had quite a few friends, other doctors, who had fled Iran during the Shah’s rule. They were young men and opposed the monarchy. The only one I knew who went back is my friend. We see each other still and he attended my 80th birthday party. He married a nurse named Dixie (of all things) during his orthopedic residency. They live in Pasadena, CA.
Freedom House has a scoring system to rate regimes by their injuries to civil liberties and political participation. Iran in 1977 received a score that put it at the median of the bloc of countries in the Near East, North Africa, and Central Asia. (There were lurid tales at the time about the SAVAK, but you have to wonder if they were largely urban legends, or at least tales of woe which were quite prevalent in that part of the world). One of the Shah’s last prime ministers, Gen. Golam Reza Azhari, supposedly told American officials at the end of 1978, “The Shah cannot make up his mind, and for that reason the country is lost”.
I remember being at Stanford, not knowing too much about the Iran situation, but hearing the anti-Shah protests in ’78 ish.
I did NOT like the SAVAK, nor the Pinochet secret police of Chile. But in Chile I thought the socialists were worse, and suspected that in Iran the alternative would be worse.
The pro-human rights democrats plus the elite socialists plus the communists plus the Ayatollah Islamists were enough, thru protests, to get the Shah gone. Then the commies, socialists, and democrats were purged, leaving the Ayatollah. Far worse than the Shah.
I was working in Argentina at the time of the hostage crisis. Coincidentally, a week before the November 4, 1979 takeover, an Iranian employee of the company flew down from Houston for some equipment repair. An Argentine woman asked him about the new theocracy being installed in Iran. His reply was that if that was what the Iranian people wanted, that was their choice to make. I never saw him again. I doubt he returned to Iran.
In 1978, an Iranian gave me ride when I was hitching around Houston. He told me about a protest against the Shah. I also suspect that he never returned to Iran.
I used to interview applicants to UC, Irvine medical school. I met some very interesting young people. One was a young man from Iran who had served in an Iranian army aid station during the war with Iraq. He got interested in medicine and lost any enthusiasm for the regime, as twin results. He immigrated to the US where he had a brother working in San Jose CA. He got a job working nights at Sun Microsystems and went to junior college, then San Jose State during the day. His work ethic was off the charts, He was worried about bias against Iranians but I reassured him. I never learned if he was admitted. Some of the full time faculty had odd ideas about who should be medical students,
Neo’s comments about revolutions consuming their own reminded me of General Raul Baduel of Venezuela. He was one of Hugo Chavez’s closest friends and allies. He was Minister of Defense. It was Baduel who, in 2002 after Chavez had resigned, reinstalled Chavez in the presidency after the Opposition made a political mess of taking over the government.
In 2007 he publically questioned Chavez’s Constitutional Referendum. After that Baduel slowly broke ranks with Chavez as he became uncontrollably megalomaniacal. In 2008, Baduel wrote his own Swan Song in the form of an Editorial that was published in the press. In this editorial he had the temerity to say that it was possible to discuss distribution of wealth, but that before wealth could be distributed it must first be produced.
Shortly after that, he was arrested on corruption charges. He remains in prison (without trial) to this day.
*** Neo Alert ***
Neo – Given your expertise on the art of dance – I’m soliciting your comments on Gia Kourlas review in the NYT re: Sean Spicer’s performance on DWTS.
Do you agree with Ms. Kourlas that Spicer’s green shirt was “scary” ?
Do you agree that Spicer exhibited a “cold brutality” ?
Thanks in advance for your assessment.
Roy Nathanson:
Neo’s comments about revolutions consuming their own reminded me of General Raul Baduel of Venezuela. He was one of Hugo Chavez’s closest friends and allies.
Good point. Here is an earlier example of another General breaking with Hugo Chávez. When Chávez campaigned for President in 1998, one of his main talking points was a crackdown on corruption. General Urdaneta made the mistake in 2000, of taking Hugo Chávez at his word. From Rory Carroll’s Comandante: Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela.
BTW, Rory Carroll works for The Guardian. Not all lefty journalists are fact-free ideologues. This is an excellent book.
But there’s very little doubt about the identity of another former hostage-taker who’s riding high at present: Hussein Sheikholeslam, recently an Iranian diplomat and legislator.
When I was working on Gulf Coast rigs at a time when the Shah was still in power, fellow employees told me of their former supervisor, an Iranian named “Sheikoslami” – phonetic spelling. He was, they told me, very competent and also not afraid to disagree on technical matters with HIS superiors- and also to be later be proven right in those disagreements. (Before getting on the ‘copter one week for days off, he left a prediction on the cafeteria chalkboard about the depth at which the well would blow out. He was proven correct.) Some years later, I was laid off and in grad school. “Sheikoslami” was in one of my classes, and also employed with another company- at a substantial raise in salary.
I wonder if petroleum engineer “Sheikoslami” was related to hostage-taker and diplomat Hussein Sheikholeslam.
I well remember the hostage crisis. I was a freshman in college when it began, and as I recall it was 444 days interrupted by the death of John Lennon. And the weather sucked and the economy was awful. And when they finally settled the hostage issue Nightline continued by covering Reagan’s shooting. Bad times, amigos.